Review: A near-great, Steinbeck-inspired ‘Mother Road’ takes off at Berkeley Rep
Octavio Solis journeys down the fabled Route 66 in “Mother Road,” his impassioned sequel to “The Grapes of Wrath.”
The playwright has long had a yearning for the West and its denizens, the searchers and the dreamers who haunt its epic landscapes and contentious borders in works from “Santos & Santos” to “El Paso Blue.” Here he revisits the fate of Steinbeck’s immortal Joad family, refugees of the Dust Bowl who came to California seeking refuge from the deprivation of the Depression only to toil, forever penniless, in the fields.
Marked by Solis’ gift for mining the universality of the Mexican American experience, this moving drama reaches for a mythic grandeur that it often attains, but it also still feels like a work in progress in its regional premiere at Berkeley Rep, directed by David Mendizábal. Some crucial characters feel more like symbols than people and the choral interludes, while galvanic in their own right, never feel married to the narrative.
The play revolves around a battered green truck carrying a grizzled old farmer named Will (the estimable James Carpenter) and a young farmworker named Martin (Emilio Garcia-Sanchez) who realize to their great chagrin that they are both descended from Tom Joad. They bristle against that connection at first but eventually come to see that they both share a longing for the land, a sense of rootedness amid a restless culture.
“Mother Road” digs into that universal search for home with the aching beauty of its poetry, which deftly evokes a gritty world, mired in tragedy and streaked with magical realism.
The wind sings a dirge. Weeds swallow up rusty old trucks. Tanya Orellana’s stark set of ramshackle wooden barns with Cha See’s lights beaming through the cracks in the slats and Jake Rodriguez’s sound making the ground rumble help conjure this hardscrabble landscape of highways and dirt, blood and hunger.
Some of these grand symbols overreach in their grasp for legendary proportions, some moments fall short of their epiphanies and several key characters, particularly Martin’s fiancée Amelia (Cher Álvarez) and the holy man of the land, James (Branden Davon Lindsay), deserve far more depth. Still, the play is so deeply suffused with the playwright’s love for these characters and their plights that it’s hard not to share his affection for all the vagabonds and lost souls, especially the quirky badass sidekick Mo (a wry Lindsay Rico).
In its finest moments, the majesty of the play is breathtaking enough to wish for the playwright to keep sculpting “Mother Road” until it’s moving enough to barrel into greatness.
Contact Karen D’ Souza at karenpdsouza@yahoo.com.
‘MOTHER ROAD’
By Octavio Solis, presented by Berkeley Repertory Theater
Through: July 21
Where: Berkeley Rep’s Peet’s Theatre, 2025 Addison St., Berkeley
Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes, one intermission
Tickets: $22.50-$134; www.berkeleyrep.org